I can tell you, working nights is not particularly conducive to mental well-being. Especially when nearly everyone you meet is somewhat insane as it is, and a good number of them are just completely crazy.

June. Before the solstice and the fading of the sunlight. The beginning of summer is always the ending of another year. Another epoch. As usual, I am always facing the brink of time alone, each time finding myself further and further from civilization. (A voice cries out in the wilderness.) The exile has never ended. I’ve lost any hope of finding a distant shore. Like The Flying Dutchman denied from mooring at any port, I am forced to sail on, sail on.

I once had a dream about blogging, being irritated with the emergency department, and the planet Pluto. Somehow these elements randomly came together tonight for no particular reason, and I got this eerie feeling that somehow I can dream about the future. This isn’t the first time this has occurred, and it’s not just some déjà vu weirdness. Unfortunately, my dreams about the future are never useful.

I don’t know how this managed to elude me for so long, and I don’t really know what prompted me to look this up. Somehow I had stumbled upon the word kairos, which up to now I had merely thought of as the high-school retreat that my high school, along with many Catholic high schools, has seniors participate in. At my school, it wasn’t mandatory, so I never went. I hear that it can be quite life-changing and that it’s very touchy-feely. There insider motto is “Live the Fourth.” Since the Kairos retreat is three days long, I have been told that “the Fourth” means the fourth day, which basically means that one’s life should be lived as an extension of the Kairos experience.

So I thought about the story of Snow White, how her mom pricks her finger on a sewing needle, and when she sees a drop of blood upon the white cloth she is sewing, she thinks of naming a daughter Snow White. So she gives birth, and then dies.

Bush and Cheney’s disdain for the rule of law—to the point of disobeying their own laws—has been flitting around in my consciousness for the past couple of days. On one hand, it’s not surprising at all. Ever since the election of 2000, W and his cronies have been breaking laws and have tried to consolidate the supreme power of the executive branch. From W’s usurpation of the presidency, to the illegal war in Iraq, the abolition of habeas corpus, the institution of torture, and W’s unlawful signing statements, these bastards have far exceeded Nixon’s violations. But Devilstower on The Daily Kos puts it into chilling perspective.

I don’t know if it’s because I have just a touch of risk-seeking behavior, but the concept of backward compatibility was never a compelling reason for me to expect that people would deliberately sabotage innovation. And yet, witness the gutted shell that is Vista, which is lacking interesting features like WinFS and Monad/Powershell (although this is eventually going to be released), features that would actually make me want to explore this brave new OS. (And these are only the most infamous of the scrapped features, to boot.)

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not a developer. The extent of my hacking history lies in the good old 8-bit days when I was hand-coding machine language programs into BASIC DATA statements. I learned, of all things, Pascal (which happened to be the programming language tested on the AP Computer Science test) and tried to muck around with C and C++, but eventually gave up with that and ended up learning Perl instead.

I feel utterly tired and spent. I have spent the last two weeks living an unnatural existence, forced to try to sleep during the day and stay awake at night. I can almost imagine my adrenal glands screaming, trying to pump out enough cortisol and epinephrine to keep me from crashing. After my last shift tonight, I wouldn’t be surprised if I end up sleeping until Monday.

Gorked is a word we like to throw around the emergency department and the hospital wards from time to time. In our general usage of the term, it basically means someone who is non-responsive, generally comatose (as opposed to mere altered mental status/delirium.) In some ways, it has an iatrogenic connotation to it, as it is sometimes used to describe patients who are inadvertantly rendered unresponsive due to excessive dosing of medication (although the more common terminology for this condition is snowed) or unresponsive because of a bad clinical outcome, such as massive stroke, brain hemorrhage, post-code brain (so called because this is what tends to happen when they call a code blue [cardiac and/or respiratory arrest emergency] and it takes more than 8 minutes to get you back, meaning that there is bigtime hypoxic-ischemic brain injury—no oxygen or bloodflow to the brain), or post-bypass brain (which is usually a lot more subtle, and usually has psychiatric qualities to it, but occasionally, someone who gets a coronary artery bypass graft—abbreviated as CABG and affectionately pronounced like “cabbage”—gets gorked.)